Influences of Jane Austen’s Naval Siblings on Mansfield Park

Dear Reader, 

Please note, I will be taking a break from blogging. You can still reach me at: sheilajohnsonkindred@gmail.com

Keep safe.

Sheila

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Mansfield Park is known as one of Jane Austen’s naval novels.[1] The heroine, Fanny Price, has a brother William, who is trying to make a career in the navy. Portsmouth, the Royal Navy’s largest and most important base of the period, is involved in eight chapters and a significant scene in the plot takes place in the Portsmouth Dock Yard

Fig. 1: Portsmouth Harbour.[2]

It has been long suggested that Jane’s sailor brothers, Francis and Charles, were available to advise her on matters of technical naval vocabulary and authentic naval references.[3] Brian Southam thought it was probably Francis Austen, the brother known to be a stickler for accuracy, who identified the corrections Jane needed to make in her description of William Price’s vessel, HMS Thrush, as its makes its way out of Portsmouth harbour to its anchorage at Spithead.[4] Whichever brother advised her, she  took this counsel seriously and included these recommendations in the second edition of Mansfield Park.

Fig. 2: Mansfield Park.[5]

Other details in the novel correlate with actual experiences and actions of the sailor brothers. Four of the named vessels which Jane locates in Portsmouth harbour match ships associated with Francis and Charles. Francis had been captain of the Canopus and the Elephant; Charles was a midshipman and lieutenant on the Endymion and became captain of the Cleopatra. Additionally, Jane has William Price give his sister Fanny “a very pretty amber cross” (254), a detail which echoes Charles’s generosity in May 1801, when he gave each of his sisters a topaze cross with gold chain.

The influence of Jane’s sailor brothers’s on her creative processes should not be undervalued, but to see them as Jane’s sole source of naval information within her family would be wrong. Doing so ignores the possible contributions made by Fanny Palmer Austen, who was Charles Austen’s young wife. I have argued elsewhere that there are interesting parallels between Fanny’s experiences as a naval wife and those of several female naval characters in Persuasion.[6] Similarly, Fanny’s understanding and expertise about the world of naval dockyards could have been useful  for Jane when she was writing Mansfield Park.

Take, for example, the important scene in the novel when Henry Crawford contrives to visit Fanny Price at Portsmouth. A persistent suitor, he attempts to curry favour with her once more. At this point in the novel, there is a measure of suspense. Might his suit yet succeed?  Although “he had seen the dock-yard again and again” (402) Crawford is happy to join Fanny, her sister Susan and her father on another visit to the Yard. “Once fairly in the dock-yard,” Mr Price (their guide) is usefully distracted by a friend “who was come to take his daily survey of how things went on” (402). Left alone, “the young people sat down on some timbers in the yard, or found a seat on board a vessel in the stocks[7] which they all went to look at” (403). Thus Austen depicts the Yard as offering a convenient location where, under the cover of an ordinary visit, other matters could be raised. This is an option that Crawford exploits fully by corralling Fanny in a tete a tete[8] as he tries to impress her with his concern for the tenants at his estate, Everingham. Fanny is interested: “it was pleasing to hear him speak so properly… to be the friend of the poor and oppressed… She was willing to allow he might have more good qualities than she had been wont to suppose” (404-05). Though Fanny is still wary of him, Henry makes some headway on this occasion.

Fig. 3: Portsmouth at the time of Mansfield Park[9]

According to Brian Southam, “her familiarity with Naval  Portsmouth Yard enabled Jane Austen to conduct Fanny [Price] and Henry Crawford through the Dockyard.”[10] He thought that  living as she did at Southampton for almost three years,[11] she must have become familiar with Portsmouth, its harbour and its dockyard. But Jane’s sister, Fanny Austen, had lived and experienced the work and society of Naval Yards in Halifax and Sheerness. Perhaps Austen was intrigued to hear from Fanny about the daily business of these Yards and the social life which took place within them.

Details of William Price’s life as a midshipman are also informed with the knowledge of Jane’s siblings. One instance is a passage describing an entertainment that William Price attends while on shore at Gibraltar. Austen initially imagined the event taking place at Government House, but, not being sure whether the location was appropriate, she sought more information about Gibraltar. She did find an answer. Having read Sir John Carr’s book, Descriptive Travels in the Southern and Eastern Parts of Spain (1811), Jane wrote Cassandra that “there is no Government House at Gibraltar - I must alter it to the Commissioner’s.”[12] Although she could double check Sir John Carr’s claim with Francis or Charles, who had served in the Mediterranean, Fanny could also confirm the use of Commissioner’s Houses for social gatherings in other places. She was certainly aware of, and likely attended, balls and entertainments regularly held at the home of Captain Inglefield, the Commissioner at the Naval Yard in Halifax, Nova Scotia.[13] Fanny had also stayed in the home of  Commissioner and Mrs Lobb at the Sheerness Yard in Kent, England and would know about its social role on that base.[14]

Fig. 4: The Commissioner’s House, Halifax, as seen from the harbour.[15]

While William was socializing at Gibraltar, we learn that he paid attention to the ladies and particularly noticed the headgear worn by “Mrs Brown, and the other women, at the Commissioner’s” (235), an item of apparel which he found bizarre.[16] The inclusion of this small detail about fashionable dress enriches the description of the event and invites the reader to visualize the movement, the colour and the spirit of the proceedings.

Jane Austen only occasionally mentions details of dress in her novels, so this reference to headwear is an interesting inclusion. It would be fun to know just what style of headwear William found so surprising, even “mad.” The action in Mansfield Park was likely set between 1808-1809, but the novel could also have drawn on details from the period leading up to 1813.[17] This time scale adds to the possibility that Mrs Brown and the others each wore some fanciful variant of a “feathered bandeau,” that is a  head band decorated with a tall, waving  ostrich feather. Such headgear is depicted in various contemporary prints, including the caricature, “Lumps of Pudding” by Henry Bunbury and William Health, 1811.[18]  

Whether Fanny shared with Jane anecdotes about how woman dressed at fashionable entertainments in Halifax cannot be traced. Yet, if Jane was interested in descriptions of style trends in colonial locations, Fanny was a source she might have consulted. Fanny was qualified on this subject as her interest in the intricacies of dress is evident from her letters.[19]

Jane Austen’s naval brothers, Francis and Charles, and her sister-in-law, Fanny, were individually important to her and valued as family members. They also contributed to her powers as a writer, as witnessed by some of the effective naval details in Mansfield Park which seem to relate to their lives and experiences.

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[1] The other naval novel is Persuasion.

[2] “Portsmouth Harbour” by Thomas Rowlandson, early 19th c. 

[3] Her nephew, James Austen Leigh, author of A Memoir of Jane Austen, 1870, wrote that “with ships and sailors she felt herself at home, or at least could always count on a brotherly critic to keep her right.” See the edition edited by Katheryn Sutherland, OUP, 2002, 18. According to Brian Southam, “the sailor brothers played an important part in the writing of Mansfield Park and Persuasion, the two naval novels.” See “Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers Francis and Charles in Life and Art,” Persuasions 2003, 34.

[4] All subsequent page references are to R. W. Chapman’s edition of Mansfield Park (MP), Oxford, 3rd edition, 1934. See vol.3, ch. 7, 380, ll.19-20 and ll.25-26 for the description of the Thrush’s movements.

[5] Edition published by OUP, Oxford World Classics.

[6] See Sheila Johnson Kindred, Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister (JATS), ch. 9, 192-99.  

[7] The vessel was under construction.

[8] Although Susan is also present, Henry manages to get Fanny’s full attention as if they were in conversation on their own.

[9] From Brian Southam, Jane Austen and the Navy, 2000, 213.

[10] See Brian Southam, “Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers Francis and Charles in Life and Art,” Persuasions, 25 (2003), 41.

[11] Southampton is 19 miles from Portsmouth.

[12] The Commissioner was the local administrator of the Yard. See Letter 78, 24 January 1813, in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Le Faye, 2011, 207. This correction to her draft of MP is found in Book 2, ch. 6, 235. 

[13] See my blog, “Fanny Palmer Austen and the Halifax Naval Yard,” posted 28 February 2020.   

[14] There was, strictly speaking, a difference between a Dock Yard and a Naval Yard. Portsmouth was known as a Dock Yard due to its full-service facilities for building, repairing and refitting naval vessels. In comparison, the Yards at Halifax and Gibraltar were classified as Naval Yards. They were smaller facilities whose work forces repaired and refitted naval vessels. Even given this distinction, in common parlance Naval Yards were often referred to as Dock Yards.

[15] “HMS Asia off the Naval Yard”, c. 1797, by G. G. Lennox, from the cover of Ashore and Afloat, Julian Gwyn, 2004.

[16] Notably, this reference to female headgear shows that William is forthright and not afraid to express his opinion. It is a touching detail that when he sees Fanny decked out in headwear similar to that of the ladies in Gibraltar, he is not critical. He says: “Fanny can reconcile me to any thing (235).

[17] See Clive Caplan, “Naval Aspects of Mansfield Park,” Jane Austen Society Report for 2006, 70-71.

[18] See Hilary Davidson, Dress in the Age of Jane Austen, Yale University Press, 2018, endpapers. For more images about dress in “Lumps of Pudding” see https://brightonmuseums.org.uk/discover/2017/09/12/lumps-of-pudding-several-feet-of-dancing-fun-in-jane-austens-time/.

[19] See JATS, 68, 144, 148.